Water and wind are friction forces that continuously erode and shape landscapes, and the record of their effects is left behind on Earth’s terrain. As Laurie travels to the Monahans Sandhills in West Texas, a tornado threatens and leaves her vulnerable in a place with limited refuge, but she finds a modest motel made of cinderblock to wait out the storm. Desert images are contrasted with images of rain falling on roofs adjacent to the Electron Movers studio at 128 N. Main Street in Providence, Rhode Island, filmed from the safety of a venerable brick structure that has withstood the assaults of time and weather. Laurie’s running internal dialogue, a continuous “crawl” along the bottom of the screen, mimics commercial television’s weather alerts and suggests how the effects of daily experience shape our emotions from moment to moment, also imprinting a lasting record in us both physically and psychically.
Water, Wind, & the Record of the Rocks
Laurie McDonald
1979 00:09:40 United StatesEnglishColorMono4:33/4" U-matic videoDescription
About Laurie McDonald
Laurie McDonald is a media artist, writer, graphic designer, and photographer. In 1972, she began exploring video as an art-making tool and was a founding member of the video art collective Electron Movers, Research in the Electronic Arts, based in Providence, Rhode Island. Her early work was exhibited at The Kitchen (NYC) and included in the 10th, 11th, and 12th annual New York Avant Garde Festivals, and at venues throughout New York and New England.
She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship and four American Film Institute/NEA Fellowships. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pierre du Chardin Gallery (Paris), The Gallery of Modern Art (Rome), and at festivals including the American Film Institute’s Film/Video Festival, the Tokyo Video Festival, the Festival du Cinema in Montreal, and at Filmfest (Berlin, Budapest, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Moscow).
As a writer, her experience ranges from novels to screenplays to instructional/informational writing. Using the pseudonym Eva Rome, she has written and published three books: Travel for STOICS; What It Means: Myth, Symbol, and Archetype in the Third Millennium, Vol. 1; and Location X: A Quest for Place. She has served as a screenplay consultant to the National Endowment for the Arts Media Grants Committee, as a contract screenplay and script writer/consultant, and as both a book editor and book cover designer. As a graphic designer and photographer, she has designed and built Web sites, graphics for print, and graphics for video. She has published two books of her own photographs: Chair, and Fotocollées.
Laurie is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and holds a Master of Literature degree from the University of Houston. She lives in Evanston, Illinois, USA, and in San Miguel de Allende, México.